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You may have heard the phrase - Never Assume because you make and ASS out of U and ME? We all do it.

Which reminds me that we all generalize as well (see what I mean).

Put the two together and you have a generalized assumption.

So, next time you hear someone in a meeting say, “People want to see that”, or, “then they will do this”; wonder if it’s really true.

Assumptions are there to be challenged.

You probably hear them all the time (there’s another one), along with negative reasons from individuals about why ’something won’t work’.

The guys at Google were told that there’s no money in search, people want portals - did they?

Established retailers thought people wouldn’t buy online - now they are scrambling to climb aboard.

As marketers, sometimes the opportunity is found on the edges, rather than in the safe middle ground. Have you got the balls to take a chance?

More importantly, can you afford not to?

I have to be honest, a don’t have a degree in marketing so everything I talk about usually comes out of a book, is applied and tested and re-worked into an ideology - it works for me.

Anyway, I had a marketing meeting this morning about The Escape and something hit me like a brick… marketing campaigns are not linear, they’re radial.

By having an epicentre for a campaign you can spread outwards. I’m not sure if this is driven by my work with the web but by creating multiple epicentres you will also inevitably end up with cross-over from different directions. A bit like sowing multiple fields of seeds with the idea that someone wants “food”.

Another great advantage of this approach is implementation. A campaign that starts at a centre and moves outwards it a lot easy to manage, can be measured and can still be scalable.

This may be obvious stuff to the more studious followers of marketing but for me… I feel like I have been hit round the face with a big wet fish.

Thoughts anyone?

Via E-Consultancy comes details from a report from the Direct Marketing Association that asked contributing ESPs (Email Service Providers) what value their clients could allocate to an email address? The average result being £9.11.

This figure obviously isn’t finite and is industry and business dependent. For instance, if your average sale value is £1m then I would guess an e-mail address is worth more than if your average sale value is £30.

What interests me is that we have an average figure to work to and of course there is nothing from stopping you doing your own specific research.

This begs a question that’s worth pondering (and acting on). How much would you spend to aquire a quality e-mail address lead and, more importantly, how much would you invest to keep hold of it?
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So, this week it emerges that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo and Google’s share price (independently) dropped 9% (FT). We may have a scrap on our hands for online domination. But, the key point here is the rise of the user - yes that’s you…

Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale talked about the fall and rise of social tribes nearly ten years ago in Funky Business. Today, we are obsessed with social networking - the Internet makes this very easy. We connect to people we want to, and talk about things we want to discuss, directly - no intermediaries and no matter how obscure the topic.

For instance, I want to buy a new TV this weekend. I went to the shop and got bombarded. So, I went online and read a number of reviews. Even the users reviews were voted on by other users so I could filter those out.

Around the same time business was getting funky, Seth Godin was talking about Permission marketing: The fact that we don’t actually want to be marketed to arbitrarily - and how we won’t have to as technology will enable personalised communication.
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It used to be that a client would come in with a brief for a brochure and a flat budget, “I have £5,000 and I need 3000 brochures.”. Easy.

An effective website is different and boy do a lot of people waste a lot of money on the wrong things. Many times  in a pitch for a website I have advised someone not to spend their entire budget building a website, slashing their estimates and crushing their dreams. In fact, a prospect in a pitch meeting last week had to ask me how we make our money, because I wouldn’t sell a quick fix solution.

So how do you budget for your website?
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If you are exhibiting this year, you may be interested in our free e-book download - Effective Exhibition Strategies and How To Deliver Sales

So, apparently a recession in the UK is now almost inevitable (ref).

Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. The relentless negative sway of reporting is talking us all into it, but I guess these things do come in cycles so perhaps 2008 may be a challenging year… if you so decide.

I like to stay positive. Already this month I have read about ASOS, GAME and Morrisons all doing very well thank you very much and it gives me a more positive outlook.

Yes, people don’t want what they used to want, but we are still trying to sell it to them despite saturated markets.

And what about differentiation - marketing and brand - which is one of the key areas of spend that starts getting cut in tough times when surely it is the time to be pushing rather than pulling?

Recognition

The first part of solving the problem for your business is recognising the patterns and who is doing well in your industry - what have that got that you don’t?

Are your services and products still relevant or have they moved on. Take The Escape…

Design and web creation is now more accessible - you can even save a Word file as a web page.

So, some small businesses are creating their own design, using relatives who are ‘creative’ or by using Powerpoint and clip-art. The trade-off between cost and quality of desktop colour is acceptable for them so they chose to do some of the things themselves, that five years ago they may have needed us for.

The same with web. We don’t (and can’t) compete with Frontpage or Dreamweaver but it is an option for small business to reduce costs. Last week, we lost a website project because someone’s friend had just set up a business doing websites from home.

But, is this approach a false economy? It’s marketing and it needs measurable results.

Effective marketing is about reaching and engaging a relevant audience and your company’s offering needs to be refined, explained and differentiated so that you engage your target market.

At The Escape we did this, so now we “create business websites that get actual results”. And, we can prove it with our design, web and online marketing case studies… it’s a lot more compelling in terms of a definable business offering.

By defining what you really excel at, you can compete on the higher ground, especially if you can spread the word effectively and this is where the web comes in for two reasons.

1. You have more competition and some of them have much lower overheads than you can ever imagine - can you, and should you, compete?
2. You have more reach with relevant people on the web - if they can find you and engage.

Capitalising on reach

The key to making the most of your reach is to answer the age old business edict of “supply a demand”. What’s more, you then go on to tell everyone about it using content that people can identify with.

If you are truly good at what you do and your offering answers a problem, then you have a viable business - but you have to validate your market position.

If you are not already, refine your case studies, create white papers; start showing off.

You gotta ‘tell it to sell it’ and if a recession is on it’s way, it’s time to start shouting!

Blind acceptance is no longer the norm.

Whilst there are some that will follow many said truths, a larger number of people have the awareness to follow their curiosity, especially with immense online search capabilities. This is despite a childhood that may have discouraged this behaviour. Don’t you know that “Curiosity killed the cat“?

In fact, school was the same. “Fact” after “fact” imparted by people who know best. They don’t want you to “think outside the box” just follow the text book.

As an adult and realising that most countries are force-fed an element of censored history, I rebelled and got hungry myself, questioning my own beliefs, as well as at work, where I needed to prove ‘marketing ideas’ to myself before I would accept right or wrong.

Seth Godin talks about this kind of curiosity in a 5 minute video by Monday9am.

Cross this sociological pattern over to your business and you soon start to realise that, in knowledge-based service industries, your clients are the same. They want information, and it needs to lead to results.

Example in point, I launched two free web seminars last Friday and less than four days later they are both nearly full with knowledge-hungry clients.

Knowledge marketing and Thought Leadership attracts profile online that can lead to client-acquisition.

The chances are these inquisitive clients will have the same dedication throughout their job role: Hungrier for success and maximizing their results, which in turn reflects on your service offering leading to more successful case study data.

This is a core element of the DMA environmental strategy.

Accurate, relevant data is vital.

Did you know that around 15,000 people either die or move premises every single day in the UK?

Your data is never going to be 100% accurate but if you don’t update or suppress it then the problem of the decay just keeps on growing. And business data decay is much, much greater than consumer data.

Every time you don’t do it, every time you send something out to the wrong person at the wrong address - that’s another black mark against your brand.

So think about it, when was the last time you cleaned your data?

The chances are, your customers don’t care about you. Perhaps you think they really do, so sorry to shatter that illusion.

They are busy at work in their own worlds, with their own problems and they are bombarded, hence they get apathetic to anything that does not directly affect them personally.

Personal example in point. I watched a documentary series last week about chicken farming. It changed my thoughts about free-range versus supermarket meat and I vowed to start buying free-range. I am, however, in a minority.

According to Smart Planet, the Super Market feedback from the series actually seemed show an increase in sales of chickens across the board. It seems that people simply don’t care enough. In fact, I ‘had’ to buy an off-the-shelf chicken last night at my local Tesco Express when they didn’t have free-range left.

It’s a hard battle to win and it’s important to remember, especially for small businesses, that it’s not personal.

One way to potentially overcome customer apathy is to offer regular communication that answers their ’selfish’ requirement, ie. What’s in it for me?

E-mail newsletters, RSS feeds, even telephone calls, allow us to easily communicate and engage with our clients regularly and the more relevant your ‘this is what’s in it for you’ can be… the better.